Pakistani authorities recently came out publicly and announced that 1.7 million Afghans will be deported. In the capital, Islamabad, backhoes have already begun demolishing Afghan homes. If the deportation is carried out, it will be the largest forced transfer of people in the 21st century.

Many of the Afghans have lived in the country since the 1980s when they fled the neighboring country in connection with the Soviet-Afghan war. Others came in connection with the 2001 war between the US-led coalition and the Taliban.

In the shadow of the Pakistani mass deportation, Iran has also started deporting the country's Afghans, while many Iranians are jubilant in the streets. Although the Afghan population is not as large as in Pakistan, it is about 700,000 people, it is about people who in many cases have lived in Iran for more than twenty years.

Afghanistan, which since the American withdrawal in 2021 is ruled by the Taliban, has serious problems with famine. Accommodating a couple of million more people will hardly improve the humanitarian situation.

Sympathies from the rest of the Muslim world have not been forthcoming. No one has offered to accept the Afghans. There are also no large demonstrations in support of the Afghans, either in the Muslim world or in the West. No UN resolutions are written in favor of the Afghans. There is silence.

The same disinterest is shown in the civil war in Yemen, which has been going on for almost ten years. On one side of the conflict is the Yemeni Republic, supported by Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia. On the other side is the Iran-backed Houthi militia, a Shia Muslim resistance group that has long tried to take power in the country.

Around 377,000 people have died in the conflict. A not inconsiderable part of these are civilians. The conflict has been devastating to food and water supplies in a country that usually already has major economic problems.

There is no great support in the Muslim world to end the devastating and prolonged war. The regional giants, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which are behind the two sides in the conflict, have made no effort to negotiate peace.

The enumeration of conflicts and humanitarian suffering in the Muslim world could go on. Where is the commitment to Sudanese suffering under the Janjaweed militia? Where is the united support for the Chinese-oppressed Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang province?

How is it that there is so much silence about these humanitarian disasters and conflicts in the Muslim world while there is complete agreement that Israel is the region's absolute worst offender?

The reason is that the hatred of Israel, and by extension Jews, in this part of the world is not proportional to sympathies for the Palestinians or any other war-affected population. It's not about solidarity with vulnerable people so much as resentment that a non-Muslim country actually exists in the region.

How else to explain that in recent weeks both Jordan and Egypt have repeatedly been completely open that they will not accept any Palestinian refugees from Gaza? The Jordanian king declared that it was "a red line" for his country.

The duplicity of the Muslim countries unfortunately has a willing partner in the West. How many demonstrations in support of Afghans, and against the Pakistani regime have been organized in Europe and the USA? Zero. How many demonstrations and protests are directed against Iran and Saudi Arabia who are constantly fueling the Yemeni civil war? Zero.

The lack of interest in solving these conflicts must be put in relation to the obsession with Israel that has once again become evident after the Hamas terrorist attack against the Israeli population. The regimes in countries like Iran or Iraq are not as interested in helping the Palestinians as they are in the annihilation of Israel.

In the West, the disinterest in other conflicts in the Muslim world is that they cannot be linked into the Western Left's square analysis of imperialism and oppression. Countries and populations that have been colonized by the West therefore get a kind of free pass. Their actions become secondary in the post-colonial analysis that dominates so much of the Western perspective on the world.

Therefore, states like Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iran do not play an important role. They are anonymous extras in a spectacle where the only villain must, by definition, be the only democratic and Jewish state in the region.

Order in the classrooms is a basic prerequisite for all teaching. In the last decade, however, the percentage of students who feel unsafe or disturbed by other students has doubled. School is also one of the most common places where young people are exposed to crime, according to BRÅ .

Of course, it doesn't look as bad everywhere. Eight out of ten students in ninth grade experience the school as a safe place. But 20 percent is not a low figure in this context – especially as it is an average.

On Monday , Education Minister Lotta Edholm (L) presented the directives for a new investigation that will try to deal with the problems. The idea is to strengthen the teachers' authority. A teacher should not have to sit and fill out a lot of documents just because it kicks a messy student out of the classroom. It will also be easier to relocate, and in the last resort, suspend rowdy students, by increasing the number of "emergency schools" and special education groups. Finally, the principal must be charged with responsibility for maintaining study tranquility in the school.

It can be said that the government increasingly wants to apply a "crime victim's perspective" to discipline problems in schools. The school cannot only assume what is best for the disruptive student, but must begin to take more into account how he destroys his peers. This means, as an ultimate consequence, that more people will be relocated to so-called emergency schools - a form of school that today only exists on the margins.

Arguments and disturbances at school have a number of negative effects for both students and teachers. In addition to pure violations against individuals, the disorder means that the school becomes more unequal, as schools in more vulnerable areas also have greater discipline problems. It will also be more difficult to recruit good teachers to such schools.

The Minister of Education pointed out that the changes should not entail additional charges for the teachers. They must be allowed to devote themselves to teaching. Other staff must relieve the teachers in security work. It is well thought out – at least in theory – but all the more difficult to implement in practice. Teachers today are forced to take on a significantly greater social responsibility for students than previous generations of teachers did, which together with the greatly increased burden of documentation has clearly reduced the attractiveness of the profession.

The presence of a school management that clearly places the work with safety and order high on the agenda is of decisive importance. There are several individual examples of this. The school staff must feel that they have the managers' backs. But the school management cannot create a safe school alone.

In an interview with GP ( 5/11 ), the Minister of Education claims that the solution is not more adults in school in general, but that more trained staff are needed. It is right to the extent that today there is a lack of special teachers, while at the same time the number of untrained student assistants in schools has grown sharply to dubious benefit. But the lack of training is perhaps not the main problem with the student assistants. An at least as big problem is the perspective.

The task of the student assistants has been to assist students with problems, including discipline problems. At Hellidsskolan in Tidaholm, the school management invested instead in "student coaches" who will be present in the corridors and build relationships with all students, not least those who feel insecure. In this way, Hellidsskolan managed to go from a problem school to being the safest in Sweden in the School Inspectorate's survey ( SR 6/11 ) .

It's really a simple thought. Safety in school is largely about the presence of adult role models who can build relationships and create calm. This is a human quality that is not solely, or even primarily, about education but about experience and judgment. A good school leader who can handpick the right staff for such tasks can make a big difference.

The security staff must be on the side of the well-behaved students when it comes down to it. The experience from Hellidsskolan is that even the rowdy students become calmer if you strengthen the other students. So here, too, the government should take a crime perspective and not just focus on education. Of course, there is a need for special teachers who can help students with problems. But it must be supplemented with security-creating staff who address all students. A young person who needs to be seen by adults should not have to become a "troubleshooter" in order to have that need met.

READ MORE: Messy classrooms are not a law of nature

The other week, the Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare announced which research projects have been granted grants for the next three years. Forte, as the council is called in everyday life, is one of the heavy financiers of social research in Sweden.

As the name suggests, the council has a special responsibility for the welfare systems and the labor market. The stated vision is to work for "tomorrow's more equal and socially sustainable society". A more equal and sustainable tomorrow, then. Thank you.

The many alarm reports of recent years show that the institutions of welfare and the labor market are both exploited and challenged.

Exploiting the institutions do those who commit welfare crimes with billions of profits, who infiltrate the public administration at various levels. They engage in undue influence towards decision-makers in the state, region and municipality. They sell passports, work permits and leases on black markets, and embezzle grants through, for example, sham divorce fairs and false information about association activities.

Challenging the systems is done by those who defy the state's monopoly of violence with extortion and patronage in vulnerable areas, who resolve conflicts through parallel legal systems, and who maintain shadow societies without rules in the labor and housing markets.

The threats to the egalitarian and socially sustainable society are many and research has a role to play in combating them. Researchers can contribute with theoretical understanding of phenomena, with illustrative comparisons in time and space. Researchers can also contribute with systematic mapping of even difficult-to-study phenomena and with reliable analyzes of the causes that have driven today's conditions. They can also assess the effect different countermeasures would have. The need for research-based knowledge is further increased by the fact that there are requirements for action programs to be evidence-based.

Unfortunately, Forte offers the research-hungry man stones instead of bread. None of the seventy projects that were granted funds, to a total value of over SEK 300 million, deal with any of the phenomena that politicians and authority representatives call systemic threats. Nothing.

From the perspective of system defense, it is just as bad with the Riksbank's Jubileumsfond, another heavy research financier that recently presented its grant decisions. Nor does that list show signs of commitment to the system threats. Disinterest is nothing new either. In debate articles together with colleagues Carina Gunnarsson and Bo Rothstein, I have shown that the pattern repeats itself several years back.

The reason for the lack of interest is unclear. We do not know whether it is the researchers who would rather research other things and therefore do not apply for funds, or whether it is the funders who say no to the researchers who are interested. I am aware of an application to Forte by meritorious younger researchers who touch on system-threatening practice. It was rejected with reference to the knowledge contribution being limited. Whether that rejection is symptomatic is impossible to say. My guess is that the "fault" lies more with the researchers than with the funders.

Regardless of the cause, the consequence is this. The fight against system-threatening forces must continue to be waged by cooperating authorities, diligent administrations, digging journalists and worried trade unions. The social scientists have other things to do.

The Swedish people have no time for death. The average number of guests who attend a funeral has halved since the beginning of the 1990s. Today there are just over 20 people. Of course, many funerals are still large, which pushes the average up. This means that the majority of funerals today are quite private affairs with the nuclear family and a few more. The neighbours, friends from the association and work colleagues come less often today.

A phenomenon that has increased is the so-called "directors". That is, the deceased who are taken directly to their final resting place without ceremonies or farewells. Nationally, directors must now be seven percent of all funerals in Sweden. In Stockholm, every tenth deceased is buried without ceremony or the presence of friends. Few speeches can say so much about our society.

Why do people miss funerals? Some attempts at explanation have been made. One is about lack of time. A funeral director says that during his professional life he has seen how the focus has shifted from the dead to the living. In the past, death had to take place and everything else had to stop. Now the relatives must look in their calendars. There is a queue for burying on Fridays because it means that the funeral guests do not have to take any more time off if they need to travel. The experiment with Saturday funerals has been a flop because then the families want their leisure activities. The Swedes simply don't seem to have time for the dead. Perhaps not so strange when we work mostly in Western Europe and our children have calendars full of leisure activities.

The time between a person dying and being buried is over three weeks in Sweden - among the longest in the world.

Another explanation concerns reluctance or unfamiliarity with the actual funeral as a ceremony. How to behave and what to say? According to a report produced by Fonus, four out of ten Swedes have felt social pressure at a funeral and more than half find it difficult to know what to say. A ritual researcher who studied funeral culture in Sweden has explained it by saying that modern Swedes are used to the ceremony being about the individual and her development. In the past, ceremonies were often about the collective and the transcendental. Even the services have moved in the direction away from the divine and towards the individual. Funerals don't fit the mold of how we're used to coming together.

Then, of course, there is the taboo around death that is always present. We don't want to think that life has an end. Three out of ten adult Swedes have not thought about how they want to be buried. Two out of three do not know how their partner wants to be buried.

Sometimes it is said that we Swedes have become unaccustomed to death because we are modern and rich. Death has disappeared from everyday life. But death is still 100 percent guaranteed. The Swedish relationship to death is about culture. Sometimes we talk about Swedish values ​​in the debate and here we have a value that needs to change.

In some sense it is a societal problem. Of course, it is not possible to legislate that people should go to more funerals. But the next time we talk about high rates of ill health, or the need for community to give society resilience against external pressures, then we can think about the solitary funerals and the full calendars. Few seem to want it as it is. According to Fonu's survey, only two percent think we should not talk more about death.

Perhaps a new popular movement is needed to allow death to take place. We can all start with small steps and visit that grave and tell someone about the ones we miss.

How come LGBTQ activists are dancing in Italian streets in support of Hamas armed attack? What motivates Greta Thunberg to unilaterally express support for Gaza after the massacre against the Israeli civilian population on October 7th? Is it about some kind of community of values? Hardly. But what remains then?

In many ways, the support can appear very paradoxical. But really, it is just as expected that large parts of the left in Europe during the 20th century united with political movements that advocated armed revolution and rejected parliamentary democracy. While large parts of the world suffered under communist oppression, protesters in the West mobilized primarily against the United States and its allies - rarely if ever against the Soviet Union and its cronies.

As long as the enemy was associated with imperialism, capitalism or colonialism, there has been, within the Western left, an almost limitless patience with movements - nationalist, revolutionary and now radical Islamist - which fought "US imperialism", according to the motto my enemy's enemy is mine Friend.

Therefore, the reactions - both the active support for armed struggle against Israel and the silence in the face of the fact that Hamas started the war currently taking place in Gaza - follow a familiar script. It is staged every time Israel needs to defend itself against attacks by Hamas.

Israel is unanimously condemned and its defense can never be considered legitimate. The country's existence is once again declared to be incurably colonial and the Palestinians and their allies cannot, by definition, do wrong as their actions are always part of a necessary resistance and freedom struggle.

This strange alliance is no coincidence but has an ancient history. The answer to why the Western left ended up here must be traced back to the 20th century and the foreign policy reversal that the Soviet Union made seventy years ago.

The Soviet Union was the first country to recognize Israel in 1948. Temporarily, Moscow's otherwise harsh criticism of Zionism, which was otherwise considered by Stalin to be a dangerous Jewish bourgeois nationalism, ceased. Military support for Israel was given, among others, from communist Czechoslovakia, which was crucial for the new country to survive the onslaught from neighboring Arab states that followed shortly after Israel declared its independence.

But then the attitude changed. During the early 1950s it became clear to the Soviet Union that Israel would never be a socialist ally in the Middle East. Instead, it was realized that there was much more to be gained by allying with Israel's Arab neighbors. This became particularly evident after the Suez Crisis of 1956 when the British and French failed to prevent the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal.

For the Eastern Bloc and the European Communists, Israel went from being the socialist promise to becoming an expression of American and British imperialism and colonialism. For the Communists, Zionism, unlike any form of Arab nationalism, became synonymous with Western-controlled imperialism. Therefore, they also actively turned a blind eye to the oppression Jews were subjected to in the Arab countries.

The left during this time devoted no demonstrations to protest the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Muslim countries. Countries like Iraq, Algeria, and Egypt that had Jewish populations longer than Islam existed as a religion persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured their Jewish residents. It is about almost a million people who were forced to leave their homes and possessions.

These people are erased from the solidarity consciousness of the left with the same precision with which the Muslim states carried out their cleansing. The simple reason is that such consideration, a kind of complicating circumstance, did not fit into Soviet foreign policy.

For the Soviets, the support to the Arab states was not really about any strong principles, it was crass realpolitik - while for the Arab states it was only about getting Israel away. Here was a nascent Arab nationalism combined with socialist elements whose great enemies were the former colonial powers, Great Britain and France. A strategic golden location for the Soviet Union.

That is why the Soviets also did everything to ensure that their new allies in the 1960s, Syria and Egypt, would attack and destroy Israel. In his memoirs, the then Soviet General Secretary and notorious anti-Semite, Nikita Khrushchev, described how the Kremlin urged the Egyptians to attack Israel. The Kremlin was fully aware that such an attack risked the complete annihilation of Israel as a state.

But Israel prevented the attack and defeated the Arab states in 1967. The defeat also meant that Gaza and the West Bank, which until then had been parts of Egypt and Jordan respectively, were occupied by Israel. But the Soviet and Arab description of Israel was set in stone.

It must be said that it was a very successful propaganda victory for the Soviet Union that its own occupation of large parts of Europe and Central Asia was accepted by the European left, while successfully portraying Israel as the unsolved colonial problem of its time.

It is actually this double bookkeeping with principles that lives on in our time. Israel is still, in the same way as was the case in the 1960s and 1970s, the imperialist power, while, for example, the Arab states' imperial ambitions and nationalism are not sorted under the category of reprehensible phenomena.

But unlike what the left in Western Europe was led to believe, this anti-imperialist mobilization did not take place out of consideration for the Palestinian Arabs. Between the years 1948 and 1967, no attempts were made by Egypt (which then controlled the Gaza Strip) or Jordan (which ruled over the West Bank) to create a Palestinian state in these territories.

They had the chance to create a Palestinian state and many opportunities would come after that. But to understand why this does not happen, one must realize that the real purpose of the Soviet Union and the Arab states was not primarily a state for the Palestinians, but that Israel, the ally of the United States and the West, would be wiped off the map.

Only when the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, was the possibility of a compromise solution seriously opened up. The Oslo Accords were based on a two-state solution but fell because the parties could not agree on how Jerusalem should be administered and that Yassir Arafat, the leader of the PLO, insisted that all Palestinians - who had lived in refugee camps since 1948 and 1967 - should be allowed to return.

The Soviet Union may have fallen, but the Soviet-backed idea of ​​Israel as an impossible imperialist actor did not. While the old Palestinian left-wing movement that Arafat led waned, its language, and that of the Soviets, was inherited by the increasingly strong Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah. The left in the West took no notice of who took over the old Soviet rhetoric, but stuck by old habit.

This partly explains why Hamas can confidently reject any possibility of compromise with Israel. They need not fear that their aggression against Israel will be seen by the promoters of the Palestinian cause in the West. Even Israel's withdrawal from Gaza (2007) was rewarded with nothing but further terror attacks. Hamas has only one goal in mind: That Israel in its current form ceases to exist.

The European left has never come to terms with the fact that it made itself a branch of Soviet foreign policy as well as the Arab dictatorships' goal of annihilating Israel. Likewise, knowledge of the Arab states' long-term disinterest in creating a Palestinian state or reluctance to integrate the Palestinian refugees has been suppressed.

The simple reason is that it never fit into the description set by the Soviet Union together with the Arab states: That it is Israel who is the imperialist in the context, the Arabs are only fighting for their liberation and everything Israel does, as long as the country does not cease to exist on its own, is wrong.

According to SÄPO , the internationally spread campaign against the Swedish social service - that it "kidnaps Muslim children" - has increased the risk of terrorist attacks against Sweden. The Tunisian man who murdered two Swedes in Brussels must also have been influenced by the campaign.

The campaign has had a particularly large impact in Gothenburg, with several demonstrations at Gustaf Adolfs Torg in recent years. But even before that, the Ali Khan family clan in Angered openly demonstrated against the intervention of social services.

Does the campaign have any merit? DN has reviewed all LVU judgments from West Sweden during the past year to see what the reality looks like ( 2/11 ). The result shows an over-representation of children with a non-Nordic background. However, this can be explained by the fact that the group generally lives in worse socio-economic conditions - that is, the intervention rate is not higher than for families with an intra-Nordic background who live in the same conditions.

Only 13 out of 389 sentences are motivated mainly by honor-related oppression within the family. Most likely, culture of honor is a component in more sentences, but the explicit reasons have then been about, for example, neglect, abuse and abuse. Culture of honor is not the same as Islam, but the phenomena overlap strongly.

In other words, there is no reason why Swedish social services would be more inclined to intervene against Muslim families than against others. Much suggests the opposite. Social services are overburdened in vulnerable areas, with high staff turnover and a greater threat level. Things that would not be accepted in better-off neighborhoods are allowed to pass. For a long time, there has also been an ignorance or a fear of conflict around everything that has to do with the culture of honor, something that has been documented in several reports about the culture of silence in the city of Gothenburg.

DN's reporters have interviewed Muslim parents who welcome the social service's intervention. They also exist. This may involve young people whose parents have lost control or cases where there are conflicts within families and relatives. After all, social services are based on rights legislation that is based on the child's best interests.

However, it probably matters less whether statistics and documentation can be used to show that social services and courts follow Swedish regulations. Basically, it is a clash of cultures where it is Sweden that deviates from a global perspective. In most countries in the world, it is a matter of course that the state should not interfere in family affairs, that the father is the head of the family and that children must obey under threat of punishment.

Therefore, it is extremely important that Swedish authorities thoroughly explain to new arrivals how the Swedish system works and what values ​​it is based on. Explaining that certain behaviors and attitudes are simply not accepted and will have consequences. At the same time, this must be done in such a way that newly arrived parents do not think that they have no authority over their own children in Sweden - which is also a common misunderstanding.

The campaign against the Swedish social service is ultimately a result of the flatness and inability that Sweden has shown for several decades when it comes to daring to stand up for its own culture and its norms. In the sign of tolerance, the difficult questions have been ducked.

The campaign against the Social Services is partly also aimed at strengthening the patriarchal and separatist forces in the suburbs and hampering the work against honor oppression. Of course, something as intrusive as forcibly taking children into custody must take place under legally secure conditions. But the problem today is rather the double standards where wrongdoing that would never be accepted in the housing estates is allowed to pass in the same way that gang crime tends to become an official problem only when it reaches the domestic middle class.

The lack of interest in taking responsibility for the "solidarity refugee policy" which has been pursued far from reality in Gothenburg's suburbs has meant a great betrayal of those who came to Sweden. The price is now paid above all by young people with an immigrant background, usually born in the country. But even Sweden as a country increasingly clearly has to pay the price in the form of increased contradictions, social problems and vulnerability to international pressure.

I have no statistical proof of this, but I would be extremely surprised if even a fifth of those who are now demonstrating with fanatical cross-certainty against Israel's warfare have heard of Gush Katif.

It was the name of the collection of Jewish settlements in the southern Gaza Strip that Israel dismantled in 2005 when, on its own initiative, it completely ended its military presence in Gaza and forcibly relocated the settlements' 8,600 inhabitants to Israeli territory, often without offering them reasonable alternative housing.

Israel's prime minister at the time, the right-wing politician and hawk Ariel Sharon, assured the Israeli public that a withdrawal from Gaza would increase their security. Giving territory to the Palestinians in exchange for peace could move closer to a solution to the decades-old conflict. Moreover, Israel's international image and position would be strengthened by such a clear sacrifice.

Even then, the withdrawal was highly controversial in Israel and Sharon was seen as a national traitor mainly by the religious right, which has since grown much stronger, thanks in part to the consequences the withdrawal proved to have.

Today, amid the raging war against Hamas in Gaza following the terrorist group's October 7 massacre and kidnapping operation, the decision to leave Gaza is seen by many as a lesson in what happens when Israel cedes territory in the hope of peace.

Two years after Israel left Gaza, Hamas took power over the area. Since then, the terrorist group's rocket attacks against Israel from Gaza have increased dramatically, making large parts of southern Israel periodically uninhabitable. The current war has forced around 200,000 Israelis to flee within the country. That would correspond to slightly less than the entire Uppsala municipality's population in Swedish terms.

Perhaps nothing has reduced Israeli public support for ending the occupation of the West Bank like developments in Gaza since Israel left the area. The result was the opposite of what the politicians promised – an increased threat to Israel and a Hamas that proved strong enough to not only continuously rain rockets over Israel, but even capture Israeli villages, massacre over a thousand people, and kidnap 250 people.

Many in the outside world seem to believe that the conflict would end peacefully if Israel ended its occupation of the West Bank. To most Israeli ears, it sounds absurd to even think about at this point. Why give Hamas and other terrorist groups even better bases for their rocket attacks? The possibility that Israel would be cut in half by an attack from the northern West Bank is one of many possible strategic nightmares. The list of the strategic factors that make the idea difficult to digest can be made long.

I am convinced that in the long term Israel must end the occupation and leave the Palestinian territories in some form, both for moral and pragmatic reasons. But how it would go about today lacks realistic, reasonable answers. It underlined not least the Hamas attack.

One of those arrested in Malmö is a 19-year-old man who is arrested on suspicion of having committed the murder, the Copenhagen police write in a press release.

A 37-year-old man was shot to death in the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen by an assailant on an electric scooter. The killer was dressed as a food delivery man, drove up close to the man and fired shots. After fleeing the scene of the murder, he changed into clothes from another delivery company.

"Ever since the murder, we have been working intensively on this violent crime and we are pleased to have a breakthrough," Deputy Inspector Brian Belling said in the press release.

The police have still not clarified the motive for the shooting death.

The two who were arrested in Malmö, partly the 19-year-old murder suspect and partly a 24-year-old Danish citizen who is suspected of some form of involvement, will be requested to be extradited to Denmark. The 21-year-old man who was arrested at the airport will appear before a remand judge in Copenhagen on Friday.

The investigation takes place in close cooperation between Danish and Swedish police, according to Belling.

The opinion polls , just over a year after the election, are hardly cheerful reading for the governing parties. In SVT/Verian's survey that was presented on Thursday, the Tidö parties collect 45.1 percent. The Sweden Democrats account for just under half of the support: 21.2 percent. The opposition gets 53.2 percent and the Social Democrats remain at a record high 37.6 percent.

In practice, it is S that pulls up the opposition's numbers. The left and the Green Party are standing still. The Center is a party in crisis during the Riksdag blockade, which has lost almost half of its voters since the election. The Liberals and the Christian Democrats are also under the ban.

In a way, the numbers are not surprising. The small parties usually do poorly a few years after a parliamentary election. They simply end up in the media shadow. It is also not unusual for the opposition to be strengthened. Having said that, the government cannot simply dismiss the winds of opinion.

Extra serious for the government is that the opposition leader, Magdalena Andersson, has a personal trust among the voters of 52 percent, while Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson only comes up to 29 percent ( SvD 14/9 ). Personal qualities are of course not unimportant. But the main explanation seems to be that two parties are competing for the leader's shirt on the right.

Because perhaps the most interesting trend is that the Sweden Democrats continue to grow apart from the Moderates. With its 21.2 percent, the SD is a completely small party larger than the Moderates, which is at 17.4 percent. In a survey by Indikator Opinion that Sveriges Radio presented last week, SD was actually larger than the government parties combined ( SR 27/10 ) .

Ulf Kristersson is a serious, well-read politician with extensive experience in heavy assignments, both as minister, city councilor in Stockholm and municipal councilor in Strängnäs. His low numbers may seem unfair from that perspective. But leadership is about more than being knowledgeable. It requires an ability to set the tone and the agenda, hard pinches if you will. Carl Bildt, Göran Persson and Fredrik Reinfeldt all had it.

A problem for Kristersson is that he is not the obvious leader of the Tidö parties. Jimmie Åkesson leads the largest party in the coalition. He does not have the same experience in responsible assignments, but he is a skilled and charismatic party leader who has led his party to great success for almost two decades. There is nothing wrong with Åkesson's self-confidence. On top of that, the major societal challenges continue to be in line with SD's core issues.

This is not unique to Sweden. The pattern is similar in large parts of the Western world. Migration, globalization and the new information technology have redrawn the political landscape. The line between "right-wing" populist parties and traditionally liberal conservatives has become blurred, even though they represent different voter bases. Thus, the political conflict also looks different. To think, like the Center Party or Dagens Nyheter's editorial page, that you can travel in a time machine back to the 1990s, if you only close your eyes hard enough to the changes, is self-delusion.

However, which will be the leading right-wing party in the new era's conflict lines is not predetermined. As I said, the moderates must show leadership if they want to keep the leadership jersey. The party must be state-bearing and preferably respected outside the block boundary. Such leadership cannot be based on focus groups and commissioned surveys. It becomes easily spread and stuck on, such as the M move the other day to ban petrol and diesel-powered cars in Stockholm's inner city.

If the Moderates are to once again become the largest party on the right, it must have more well-thought-out answers to SD's questions than those presented by SD themselves, rather than trying to be a softer complement to SD. That the latter works poorly is not least shown by the above-mentioned opinion poll from SVT, where SD is increasing in the big cities in particular and at M's expense.

One can imagine that the Moderates want to reach the female voters that SD fails to capture with some of their outreach. The opposition's entire advantage can be explained by the gender gap in Swedish politics. Among men, the Tidö parties have a clear majority. But this gender gap can almost entirely be explained by the fact that the Social Democrats lost male voters to SD but not female voters to the same extent. The question is whether M has something to pick up there. SD must at some point put an end to its brashness if it is to win more female voters. The moderates already have a reasonably even gender distribution among their supporters and should rather focus on maintaining their role as the state-bearing party.

De flesta av oss vet att man i Norrlandslänen numer söker olika sätt att attrahera arbetskraft. Politikerna diskuterar lösningar som flyttstöd eller avskrivna studielån för att få arbetskraft att flytta norröver.

Bristsituationen i Norrland är dock inte unik. Fler regioner har ungefär samma problem. I Skaraborg står också en industriell renässans står inför dörren. Men framtidsutsikterna förutsätter att man kan möta de förmodade behoven av utbildad arbetskraft.

De nyetablerade industriföretagen söker efter ingenjörer och andra yrken med teknisk utbildning. I nästa steg kommer de som ska arbeta i industrin i sin tur att efterfråga arbete från fler yrkesgrupper. Återindustrialiserade orter kommer att behöva locka till sig sjuksköterskor, förskolelärare, lärare och läkare. Problemet är att det redan råder arbetskraftsbrist på sådana välfärdsarbetare i Sverige. Är det ens realistiskt att tro att arbetskraftsbehovet i Norrland eller Skaraborg kommer att kunna lösas?

Tyvärr finns det anledning att vara pessimist. Till exempel är den utbildnings- och arbetsmarknadsprognos för Skaraborg som Västra Götalandsregionen tog fram förra året inte särskilt positiv. Politikerna i Skaraborgs kommunalförbund har som mål att växa till 300 000 invånare år 2030. Men med dagens befolkningsökning kommer man enligt prognosen från Västragötalandsregionen fortfarande år 2035 bara ha en befolkning på 277 000 invånare.

Dödstalen kommer att fortsätta vara högre än födelsetalen och andelen av befolkningen som är över 80 år är den grupp som kommer att öka mest. Den befolkningsökning som finns handlar framför allt om invandring.

Hur ska ekvationen gå ihop? Kommunförbundet har gjort en storsatsning på sajten livetiskaraborg.se. Men det är i ärlighetens namn mer av en informationskampanj. Sanningen är att de svenska tillväxtregionerna inte har några verktyg för att locka till sig arbetskraft. I Sverige har vi inte samma erfarenhet som till exempel Norge och Kanada av att erbjuda skattelättnader eller andra ekonomiska incitament.

Vi bör komma ihåg att konkurrensen är inhemsk. När Norrland lockar ingenjörer är det i konkurrens med andra industribygder, som Skaraborg.

Om svensk industri inte ska förlora alltför mycket potential på grund av arbetskraftsbrist måste frågan upp på bordet. Sannolikt behövs det både reformer för att få fler som idag är långtidsarbetslösa i arbete, och en återupptagen arbetskraftsinvandring.

So far, we see no clear answers to the demographic challenge. But often actually acknowledging what the situation looks like can be a good start.